Posted 2 years ago on Aug. 22, 2012, 8:10 p.m. EST by arturo
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from Shanghai, Shanghai
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A group of biologists and other scientists from the Mexican state of Veracruz, held an explosive press conference on Aug. 19 in Xalapa, the state capital, to denounce the anti-scientific fraud of man-made global warming. Environmentalist organizations and groups have emerged, the majority of them sponsored by the United Kingdom, that have influenced legislation in many countries to impose policies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions,'' Dr. Omar Pensado, biologist and director of the Institute of Advanced Sciences of Xalapa, Veracruz, explained on behalf of the group.It is fundamental to prevent certain groups from making climate change science a dogma that can't be questioned, and which borders on the creation of a new religion that is an attack on the human species, that is to say, eco-fascism with a green face that endangers current civilization."

Pensado, whose specialty is astrobiology and who has worked on various proposals for the terra-forming of Mars, delivered a prepared statement on behalf of his Institute, the Veracruz Federation of Biologists and Environment Professionals, the Aguirre Beltran Society of Biologists, and other groups. Their charges, and call to action, have already produced an uproar among Al Gore's friends both in Veracruz and nationally.

In his prepared remarks, Dr. Pensado explained:

We support and agree with the more than 32,000 scientists of various countries, who have stated before the United Nations,'' that there is no scientific proof thatman-made carbon-dioxide [is the cause of] climate variation on the planet,'' as well as the 650 scientists who have testified before the Senate of the United States,'' and the 50 NASA scientists who have denounced the lack of evidence for those theories. Pensado went on to challenge the IPCC in particular, saying thatvariations of heat emission from the Sun, and in the inclination of the axis of our planet,'' are the probable cause of the diverse climatic periods that Earth has undergone. . . This implies a new vies of public policies regarding climate change, seen as cosmic events.''

Pensado called for the state of Veracruz to change its environmental laws, because current policies have:

1) ``spent millions of pesos on programs for climate change mitigation, which were based on a series of erroneous ideas;''

2) ``put a brake on industrial and agricultural activity of Third World countries, in detriment of production, job creation, and services;

3) ``not taken appropriate measures . . . [to address] extraordinary solar activity of a cyclical nature, of short duration but with very serious consequences.''

The statement goes on to say that their proposal ``is also a defense of human beings as the highest creation of nature, whose greatest achievement is our current civilization. . . We are very concerned that, were carbon-dioxide mitigation plans to be implemented in agriculture and animal husbandry, given that the main policy of the IPCC is to reduce the area of those activities, the only thing that Veracruz will get as a result is poverty and hunger.''

The statement concludes by denouncing environmental organization for `accusing man of being a generator of carbon dioxide, and they therefore call for population reduction to save the planet from global warming. . . These retrograde ideas, in a world suffering hunger, are evil. Reducing the area used for crops and livestock in a poor country will only lead to hunger: Man comes first. Theirs is a defense of the planet at the expense of human beings which, in fact, are the highest creation of nature. . . Our national development should not be subject to any empire nor anyenvironmentalist religion.' . . . There may be external forces that would like to see us return to hunting and gathering, in order to save the planet, that is to say, return to atrocious poverty, to atrocious ignorance, in order to then argue that our existence isn't justified. We must not allow that. Our civilization is based on high energy, and to go backwards would only collapse what has already been established and won by the effort of humanity over centuries.''

A non sequitur and a fallacy of composition are the essence of scare stories circulating on major wire services today, which report on a new study of the extent of Arctic sea ice melt.

The study, published in the May 1 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, reports an historical review of satellite and other data which indicates that the extent of Arctic sea ice at the end of the summer melt season in September has been declining since 1953. The news stories twist this statistical fact into scare stories, the one circulated by Agence France Presse claiming that the sea level will rise by seven meters.

In fact, as anyone who observes ice melting in a cold drink can determine, when floating ice melts, the water level remains the same or falls very slightly. The claim of a rise in sea level is thus a non sequitur. It is justified on the basis of a wild fallacy of composition—the claim that the melting of the Arctic sea water will inevitablily lead to the melting of the entire Greenland glacier.

Never reported is the fact that the last major study of the Greenland ice sheet [Zwally, et al. Journal of Glaciology (2005)] showed a slight increase in ice mass from 1992-2002. The one- to two-mile thick Greenland ice sheet was thinning at the margins but growing by a greater extent inland.

Polar specialists know well that the Arctic climate is highly variable and very sensitive to small changes in local temperature. As Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the Alaska Arctic Research Center in Alaska noted, the extent of Arctic sea ice melt in the 1920s was greater than today (with far less contribution from human-produced carbon dioxide), and was followed by a period of thickening. Akasofu called Al Gore's movie "science fiction." (See interview.)

The theory that human-produced carbon dioxide produces climate warming has no scientific validity, and has been amply refuted by hundreds of leading scientists in thousands of papers.

The new study (Stroeve, et al. "Arctic sea ice decline: Faster than forecast") is questionable in that it focuses entirely on statistical methods of modeling and extrapolation. In general, extrapolation from short-term statistical trends is meaningless in scientific investigation. Three astronomical phenomena suggest that the Earth is moving towards an Ice Age: northern hemisphere summer is occurring near aphelion; orbital inclination is high at 23.5 degrees; and ellipticity is moderate. The Earth is about 11,000 years into an approximately 20,000-year long interglacial. The climatic optimum was reached nearly 5,000 years ago, and the Earth has been cooling since. New studies indicate the effect of galactic causes, such as cosmic ray influx, on the determination of climate.

But far worse than the methodological problems of the Arctic sea ice study are today's news reports of it. These represent the height of politically motivated irresponsibility. At bottom, greenhouse warming is a hoax. Its purpose is to stop industrial development, reduce population, and condemn two-thirds of the world to continued poverty and misery. As the science isn't there to prove it, the theory can only be justified by fabrications of the sort circulating on wire services today.

I provided you links to the Wikipedia articles on each one of those cities documenting their, substantial, populations.

I did watch your previously linked video, and replied that I believe that that city, and others like it if there are any, would inevitably be filled up as millions of Chinese peasant farmers are replace by agricultural machinery.

You did not provide any wiki link. Though those peasant farmers don't make enough money to rent though the workers who built the city can't afford to live there. U R funny - and more than a little sad.

That dam project provides electricity to millions of poor people, we've got to find some way to discredit it, eh?

"The complete operation of all the generators makes the Three Gorges Dam the world's largest hydropower project, and the largest base for clean energy," Zhang Cheng, general manager of the project's operator, China Yangtze Power, stated at a ceremony.

The construction of the world's biggest hydropower plant began in 1994, and its first generating unit was connected to the grid in July 2003. The official state news agency Xinhua said the dam had already generated a total of 564.8 billion kilowatt-hours, saving nearly 200 million tons of coal a year.

Bombshell: Koch-Funded Study Finds ‘Global Warming Is Real’, ‘On The High End’ And ‘Essentially All’ Due To Carbon Pollution

By Joe Romm on Jul 28, 2012 at 5:31 pm

ten year data analysis comparison graph

“The decadal land-surface average temperature using a 10-year moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 – December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval.” A Koch-funded reanalysis of 1.6 billion temperature reports finds that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.” Via BEST.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) is poised to release its findings next week on the cause of recent global warming.

UPDATE (9 pm, 7/28): A NY Times op-ed by Richard Muller, BEST’s Founder and Scientific Director, has been published, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.”

Here is the money graf:

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Yes, yes, I know, the finding itself is “dog bites man.” What makes this “man bites dog” is that Muller has been a skeptic of climate science, and the single biggest funder of this study is the “Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation ($150,000).” The Kochs are the leading funder of climate disinformation in the world!

It gets better:

Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming.

In short, a Koch-funded study has found that the IPCC “consensus” underestimated both the rate of surface warming and how much could be attributed to human emissions!

UPDATE (9 AM, 7/29): The UK Guardian has a good story up, “Climate change study forces sceptical scientists to change minds: Earth’s land shown to have warmed by 1.5C over past 250 years, with humans being almost entirely responsible.”

And here’s an amusing tweet from a top U.S. climatologist, Michael Mann:

Below is some background on BEST followed by a longer excerpt of the op-ed.

A group of scientists led by one well-known skeptic, Muller — and whose only climatologist listed is Judith Curry, a well-known confusionist [see Schmidt and Annan and Steig andVerheggen, and CP] — decided to reexamine all of the temperature data they could get their hands on. I broke the story of their initial findings in March 2011 (with the help of climatologist Ken Caldeira) – see Exclusive: Berkeley temperature study results “confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.”

The top figure is an updated chart of their findings from March of this year. They found a lot of warming.

Indeed, their key paper from 2011 found:

… our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstructions.

So the only remaining question for BEST was: What is the cause of that warming? Of course, those who read ClimateProgress or the scientific literature already knew the answer to that question (see the 12/11 post, It’s “Extremely Likely That at Least 74% of Observed Warming Since 1950″ Was Manmade; It’s Highly Likely All of It Was).

BEST is set to release those findings this week. The excellent UK Guardian reporter, Leo Hickman, tweeted earlier today that “Significant climate-related news will be breaking on Guardian website in next 24-36 hours” and then he tweeted an hour ago the link to the excerpt of Muller’s op-ed.

Here is more of the op-ed:

How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.

Well, in fact, to be seriously considered, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as does CO2 — and it must offer some mechanism that counteracts the well-known warming effect of CO2. Not bloody likely.

The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis.

What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.

Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes.

I am glad that Muller et al have taken a look at the data and have come to essentially the same conclusion that nearly everyone else had come to more than a decade ago.

The basic scientific results have been established for a long time now, so I do not see the results of Muller et al as being scientifically important. However, their result may be politically important. It shows that even people who suspect climate scientists of being charlatans, when they take a hard look at the data, see that the climate scientists have been right all along.